State Funding for Jewish Prison Chaplains

Source Description

Providing pastoral care for Jewish prisoners in the Fuhlsbüttel
prison was common practice since the late 19th century, but the legal basis for it was
only created with this agreement of January 1914.
The two-page agreement between the German-Israelite congregation and Hamburg’s
treasury office, which
is part of the collections of the Hamburg
State Archives, deals with the payment of Jewish
chaplains at the Fuhlsbüttel
prison. The agreement was made “subject to authorization of the
required funds.” As a source, it highlights the specific needs of Jewish
prisoners in Imperial
Germany, among the most urgent of which were the question of
obtaining kosher food and
religious counseling by a chaplain.

The beginnings of Jewish pastoral care for prisoners in Hamburg

At Hamburg’scentral prison in
Fuhlsbüttel,
which had been established in 1879, the German-Israelite congregation
in 1891 began to hold prayer services for its Jewish
inmates irregularly and mainly on the Jewish high holidays. In 1905, following a successful petition by Hamburg’s
chief rabbi, the frequency of these prayer services was
increased to two per month in addition to the high holidays. This in turn led to
a significant increase in the workload of prison chaplain
Butterwege, who not only cared for the inmates
of the Fuhlsbüttel
prison, but also for those at the pretrial detention facility in the
city center. Therefore the German-Israelite congregation on May 19,
1913 submitted a request that the chaplain
provided by the congregation be paid by the state.

The congregation argued
that the Bundesrat [upper house of the German parliament] as
a government organization had already confirmed that religious instruction of
prisoners in the laws of their religion was “desirable.” Moreover, while the
number of Jewish prisoners was small, it was large enough to justify spiritual
counseling; after all, there also was a state-funded Catholic
chaplain caring for the minority of Catholic prisoners
at the Fuhlsbüttel
prison.

The senate commission in charge of
judicial administration considered the congregation’s request, which
it initially viewed unfavorably. The state government’s main argument was the
low number of Jewish prisoners, which ranged between 23 and 28 inmates in the
years before the First World
War. By comparison the number of Catholic prisoners in 1904 was about 200, and therefore the senate commission considered
state-funded pastoral care for this group of inmates justifiable. Despite its
initially negative view, the senate commission tasked prison warden
Ulrich Brümmer with
making inquiries about the handling of pastoral care for Jewish inmates in
prisons outside of Hamburg. The warden learned that in most
cases the costs for their spiritual care were covered by the respective state.
As a result of a letter describing the above-mentioned inquiries, the senate commission changed its
position and decided to also cover part of the costs for Jewish pastoral care.
The prison warden was then instructed to take up
negotiations with the German-Israelite congregation.

The 1914 agreement

These developments resulted in the agreement between the city treasury and the
German-Israelite
congregation presented here. It states that in exchange for
continuing pastoral care the congregation was to receive an annual compensation of 500 Marks.
The agreement defines the chaplain’s duties of care as
follows: in addition to holding prayer services they also included religious
counseling, caring for female prisoners and pretrial detainees, and caring for
discharged ex-prisoners. Furthermore, the chaplain was
obligated to translate letters written in Hebrew sent to or by prisoners into
German. This might indicate that there were Jews of Eastern European origin
among the inmates. The agreement is remarkable in many respects. Despite the
authorities’ initially negative position and a relatively small number of
prisoners, the funding for a Jewish chaplain is granted.
Yet the German-Israelite
congregation failed to achieve its goal of establishing complete
legal equality for their chaplain’s work with that of
Catholic or Protestant chaplains; the latter were employed
directly by the state, who paid their entire salary. By contrast, the German-Israelite congregation
was merely reimbursed for a part of their expenses for the pastoral care of the
Fuhlsbüttel
prison inmates.

At the same time, the agreement displays features of a modernized justice system
that did not merely seek to punish prisoners but aimed at social reintegration.
Although this agreement was written before 1919, when
the major wave of modernization in the German justice system during the Weimar Republic set in, it
already contains elements that were emphasized more strongly in the course of
this wave of modernization, such as the goal to reintegrate prisoners into
society after they had served their sentence (§3, 5). This highlights the
particular position of prison chaplains in Imperial Germany’s
antiquated justice system in which the punishment of prisoners was considered
the purpose of that punishment rather than reforming them or the possibility of
social rehabilitation. Due to their theological background,
chaplains were able to use their relative independence
to achieve goals beyond the official purpose of imprisonment and to champion the
cause of reintegrating ex-convicts into society. While other European nations had
already begun to pursue the goal of social rehabilitation in their penal systems
due to the spreading of humanist thought and the establishment of incarceration
as a means of judicature, there had always been strong opposition to this
approach in Prussia. In Imperial Germany the understanding of the “sentence as punishment”
continued to prevail. It was only in the course of the liberalization of the
German justice system during the Weimar Republic that the state penal system moved away from this
view. Meanwhile chaplains had already understood the social
rehabilitation of the inmates entrusted to their care as part of their task much
earlier than that.

The further development of pastoral care for Jewish prisoners

As of January 1914 Jewish prison
chaplains were subsidized by the government with 500 Marks
annually. This state subsidy continued until 1933 and
was only canceled after the National Socialists came to power. Jewish
chaplains were able to continue caring for Jewish
prisoners until 1936, albeit without a state
subsidy.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.

About the Author

Robert Richter, born 2000, graduated from high school (Abitur) at Heilwig-Gymnasium in Hamburg-Alsterdorf, he now studies law at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. In 2016 / 2017 he took part in the “Geschichtswettbewerb des Bundespräsidenten” with a contribution titled “Antisemitism in the penal system? Pastoral care for Jewish prisoners in Hamburg Fühlsbüttel prison" and won a third price.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.